One Word To Define Four Years Of Trump In Court | Can Liberals Win In A Conservative Court?
November 19, 2020
THE SLOW WALK
|NPR’s Nina Totenberg reports on the House’s decision to ask SCOTUS to postpone arguments set for Dec 2. regarding ROBERT MUELLER’S grand jury materials. She notes, “Previous presidents facing impeachment inquiries in modern times — PRESIDENTS NIXON and CLINTON — allowed similar grand jury materials to be turned over to the House. ‘To our knowledge,’ said lawyers for the House in their briefs, ‘no court has ever turned down a request for grand jury materials by Congress in connection with impeachment.’ But the Trump administration refused, prompting the Judiciary Committee to go to court nearly a year and a half ago. Even as Trump fought the committee in the lower courts, the House impeached him last December, and the GOP-controlled Senate acquitted him in February 2020. Meanwhile in the courts, Trump was batting 0 for 2. Ultimately, after two lower court losses, he appealed to the Supreme Court, where the justices this past July agreed to hear the case and later scheduled arguments for Dec. 2.”
WHY YOU GOTTA BE SO MEAN
|“During four years struggling to keep up with the flood of court cases challenging the refusal by various Trump administration officials to follow the law, a word has come to mind so often that I can’t shake it. It’s the word ‘mean.'” That’s Linda Greenhouse with The New York Times in her latest column where she says, “There’s a meanness to the man and to the policies issued from the sycophantic bubble that passes for his administration.”
WHAT'S A CIVIL LIBERTARIAN TO DO
|In The New York Review, David Cole with the ACLU notes that justices haven’t been as conservative as they are today since the Progressive Era “when practically the only constitutional rights the Supreme Court recognized were the rights of big business owners to be free of regulation designed to protect consumers and workers.” Cole wonders what a civil libertarian is to do with the makeup of this court. He suggests that not all hope is lost and the battle for civil liberties must continue both inside and outside of the federal courts. “We may increasingly turn to more sympathetic forums to make initial inroads, as advocates for marriage equality so effectively did. But in the end, if the country supports civil liberties and civil rights, the Supreme Court is unlikely to get in the way. This means all of us can and must do our part to defend liberty.”